But cheer up, Alaska not worst

The good old days of a 49th state rich in oil revenues that boosted all kinds of community projects might be over, and the culture war that has split Americans right and left might rage raging even more fiercely in Alaska than in many other places, but look at the good side.

The data crunchers at WalletHub have concluded this is not the worst U.S. state in which to live.

Not that being ranked number 46 is anything to brag about. But it’s better than Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana and New Mexico with their staggering poverty rates and oversized citizens.

Mississippi, Louisiana and New Mexico are one, two and three on the list of poverty leaders in these unUnited States, according to World Population Review numbers. And Mississippi, Arkansas and Louisiana rank two, three and four as the fattest states with about 40 percent of each state’s population being reported as obese by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).

Not only that, all four of the bottom-ranked states are already sweltering with global warming promising to make things worse in the years to come. The Arctic and subarctic might be warming at a faster rate than these southern states, but it’s still a long way from sweltering.

And there is one bright spot for Alaska in the WalletHub study, if you can believe this:

Alaska’s economy was ranked the fourth best in the nation.

The methodology

WalletHub, unlike a lot of entities doing these sorts of lists of everything, actually outlines the metrics driving its conclusions, and in this case, Alaska appears to have benefited from a relatively low foreclosure rate, a bankruptcy rate lower than every other state but Wyoming,  and a surprisingly high rate for “entrepreneurship,” with the University of Chicago ranking the Alaska the third most entreprenurial state in the nation. 

Can we thank a bounty of baristas and mom-and-pop B&B operators?

Where Alaska suffers in the WalletHub analysis is in “quality of life,” which is where many Alaskans – or at least the wilderness lovers among Alaskans – would rank the state number one.

There is nowhere in the country where people live closer to the wilderness than in the 49th state. Hell, you can run into a grizzly bear in your yard if you live in the suburbs surrounding Anchorage, the state’s largest city, and black bears have even been known to wander downtown.

How many cities can boast a “bear tracker” website on Facebook offering advice on how to live with these animals as neighbors? 

WalletHub, unfortunately, ranked quality of life on such things as “access to public transportation,” of which Alaska has almost none; “quality of roads,” where Alaska can boast the worst in the nation; weather, which was sadly “triple-weighted,” and urban amenties, such as the number of museums and performing-arts centers per capita.

About the only place Alaska was destined to score well in WalletHub’s rank of quality of life was in “bars per capita.”

Meanwhile, the weather was a monstrous liability. The New York Times might think of Alaska as “the best place to be” in a climate-changing world, but WalletHub isn’t buying that.

When it in 2014 ranked 600 U.S. cities for weather using a 100-point scale where one was the best and 100 was the worst. Juneau, Ketchikan and Sitka racked up a “four-seasons” score of a perfect 100. Fairbanks posted a score of 9,  thanks to its sometimes lovely summers if the mosquitoes don’t carry you away, and Anchorage came in with a 91.

And after the last two winters in Anchorage with the heavy snows of ’23-’24 turning the city into an urban version of Ice Station Zebra and the freezing rains of ’24-’25 leaving the city a skating rink for much of the winter, Anchorage might score even worse now.

OK, so who won the battle of the “Best States to Live In?”

Patriots and Celtics

Massachusetts, a nice enough place to live if you’re rich, came in number one despite astronomical housing prices. But it does have the New England Patriots, a one-time NFL dynasty that now seems on the verge of a comeback; the Boston Celtics, about which no more need be said; a rich history and a lot of old culture.

On the other hand, the Bay State is not the place for those into the shooting sports. It has what some consider onerous firearms regulations, which might or might not explain its relatively low homicide rate of 2.5 per 100,000, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control.

Then again, the adjacent state of New Hampshire, which the Ammo.com website rates the gun-friendliest state in the nation, has the nation’s lowest homicide rate at 1.8 per 100,000, according to the CDC. The state also has the lowest share of residents living in poverty, which helped put it in the top-10 states at number seven on the WalletHub list.

The website reported it ranked Massachusetts number one, “due in large part to its strong health care system and high-quality education.” The state is home to two universities – the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard – consistently rated among the top-10 in the world.

“Good-quality education has helped the state’s residents succeed financially, with the second-highest median household income, at over $101,000,” WalletHub said, and “finally, Massachusetts has the third-lowest property crime rate in the country and has the third-best access to public transportation.”

Anchorage flunked in both of the latter categories.

Coming in number two behind Massachusetts on the WalletHub list was a gun-friendly Western state: Idaho.

Idaho, according to WalletHub, has “one of the lowest median real estate tax rates in the country, at just 0.5 percent, along with the seventh-highest homeownership rate. It also has the fourth-lowest tax rates overall and the highest median household income growth, making it a great place to build and grow wealth.

“In addition, the Gem State has the seventh-lowest share of urban interstates experiencing congestion during peak hours and the third-smallest proportion of major roads in poor or mediocre condition. This naturally leads to some of the lowest average commute times in the country.”

The website clearly averaged the commute time over the thousands of miles of good pavement in Idaho and missed the chaos in the Boise-Nampa-Caldwell corridor, which only a few years ago was reported to have the worst rush-hour traffic in the nation. The study reporting that was, however,  criticized for focusing solely on the difference between the rush-hour and off-hour traffic on I-84.

There is a huge difference there between night and day. Not so, however, with WalletHub’s other major observation.

“Idaho is a pretty safe state,” the website reported. “It has the 13th-lowest violent crime rate and the lowest property crime rate in the country.”

The Idaho homicide rate is barely above that of Massachusetts at 2.7 per 100, compared to the Washington, D.C. rate the CDC puts at 23.7, and the property crime rate in Idaho is so different from that in Alaska’s largest city that there is no way to compare the numbers.

Other than to maybe say that people in Idaho regularly leave their bikes out in their yards. Anyone doing that in Anchorage might as well put the bike at the curb with a sign on it saying, “Free bike.”